I’m 37 and I just realized that every major decision I’ve made in my adult life was designed to avoid disappointing people who stopped thinking about me the moment I left the room – and that’s a lesson most people learn too late to rebuild

by Lachlan Brown | April 12, 2026, 4:52 pm

I turned 37 last month. And somewhere between the birthday coffee and the quiet that followed, a thought landed that I couldn’t shake: almost every major decision I’ve made in my adult life, the degree I chose, the job I stayed too long in, the relationships I said yes to when I should have said no, was shaped less by what I actually wanted and more by a desperate need to not disappoint people who, the moment I walked out the door, stopped thinking about me entirely.

That’s a hard thing to sit with. But I think it might be one of the most important things I’ve ever noticed about myself.

It started clicking into place when I came across research on something called the spotlight effect. Psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Kenneth Savitsky found that people consistently overestimate how much others notice and dwell on their actions. In one famous study, participants wearing an embarrassing t-shirt guessed that roughly half the people in a room would remember it. The actual number was about half that. We think we’re center stage. We’re not even in the program.

And yet I structured years of my life around the imaginary audience. I stayed in a degree I didn’t love because my parents were proud. I took a warehouse job in Melbourne shifting televisions because it was “responsible,” even as something in me quietly died shift by shift. I said yes to things I resented because the thought of being seen as difficult, selfish, or ungrateful felt unbearable.

The Psychology Has a Name For This

What I was doing, what a lot of us do without realizing it, is something psychologists call sociotropy. Research describes it as “the tendency to place an inordinate value on relationships over personal independence,” to the point of forgoing your own desires to do what pleases others. It sounds almost noble when you frame it that way. It doesn’t feel noble when you’re 34 and you realize you don’t actually know what you want, because you’ve spent years answering a different question: what do they want from me?

The more I read, the more I understood that this pattern usually isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a learned response. Psychology identifies a “fawn response” where people cope with perceived threat by appeasing and accommodating others, a survival strategy that often develops early, in environments where love or approval felt conditional. The nervous system learns: keep people happy, stay safe. The problem is that this system doesn’t switch off when you grow up. It just finds new arenas to perform in, your boss, your partner, your extended family, strangers on the internet.

I wasn’t being kind. I was being afraid. And there’s a massive difference between the two.

The Person Who Left the Room Stopped Thinking About You Immediately

This is the part people usually resist. We want to believe that others are tracking our choices, weighing our decisions, judging our paths. We want to believe it because it gives us a reason. If someone is always watching, then caution makes sense. If someone is always judging, then performance is necessary.

But the research is blunt about this. Most people are far too occupied with their own internal world to spend much time dwelling on yours. Studies suggest that people who notice our mistakes are often far less judgmental than we assume, and most are simply too preoccupied with managing their own lives to think about ours for long. While you’re stuck replaying a conversation from three years ago, the other person has moved on entirely, probably within minutes.

The person who raised an eyebrow when you quit the job, they’ve thought about their own mortgage since. The relative who disapproved of your relationship, they’re worried about their health or their kids or their overdue electricity bill. The colleague whose opinion you reorganized your career around, they don’t remember the conversation that changed your life.

I moved to Southeast Asia in my late twenties partly to escape this invisible jury. What I found was that the jury had never actually convened. I’d been building a prison around the idea of one.

What Buddhism Got Right About This (Long Before Psychology Did)

When I started reading Buddhist philosophy, sitting in a warehouse break room on my phone between shifts, the concept that cracked me open was non-attachment. Not the lazy version of it, the “nothing matters” version, but the real thing: research from Frontiers in Psychology frames this well, noting that being non-attached toward the self allows a person to move through life with greater flexibility and a view of self free from expectation and fixation.

Buddhism isn’t telling you not to care about people. It’s pointing out that when you build your entire identity around whether someone approves of you, you’ve handed your life to a process you can’t control, and to people who are far less focused on you than you think. The suffering isn’t caused by the disapproval itself. It’s caused by the clinging to the need for approval.

That distinction changed everything for me. It meant the problem wasn’t that I cared too little about myself. It was that I was outsourcing the question of my own worth to other people, people who had their own fears, their own blind spots, their own silent juries to manage.

So What Do You Actually Do With This?

I’m not going to tell you that I read a few books, had a revelation, and now live free of anyone’s opinion. That would be fiction. My wife still catches me crafting emails for longer than necessary because I’m worried about tone. I still feel a small twist when someone misreads my intentions. The pattern doesn’t vanish. But it can loosen.

The first practical thing is just noticing. When you’re about to make a decision, pause and ask honestly: is this coming from what I actually want, or from what I think they want me to want? Those are different questions, and most of us have never been taught to separate them.

The second thing is sitting with the discomfort of small disappointments. Say no to something that doesn’t serve you. Let someone be briefly annoyed. Don’t rush to apologize. See what happens. Usually, what happens is nothing catastrophic. The relationship doesn’t collapse. The person moves on. And you’ve quietly built evidence that your worth isn’t contingent on their approval.

The third thing, and this one took me years, is accepting that some people will be disappointed by your real choices. That’s not a sign you’ve failed. That’s often a sign you’ve finally started telling the truth. The people who matter will adjust. The ones who only liked the version of you that was constantly accommodating them, that’s useful information too.

I think about my daughter sometimes, still so small, watching how her parents move through the world. The greatest thing I can model for her isn’t achievement. It isn’t approval. It’s someone who knows what they actually want, and has the quiet courage to ask for it.

The imaginary audience was never there. It was always just you, standing in a room of your own making, performing for empty seats. The question is what you’d do differently if you finally believed that.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.